Kitchen Floor: Phase 2
This is how much bigger we made the kitchen floor. We expanded it to incorporate some of the most worn carpet to vinyl transition points, and high traffic areas. It really made sense to tear out the worn rug while we were covering the old vinyl.
This was one of our worst spots, and it wasn’t getting better as the years wore on. With the expansion of the kitchen area it was slated to disappear.
The original plan was to remove all of the vinyl and the half inch particle board underlayment flooring to keep the kitchen floor at the same level of the carpeted areas. I spent two hours with a skil-saw, a special flooring chisel on a pole, and a hand chisel and I only had four square feet cleared off. The underlayment was stapled and glued down to the subfloor. This isn’t always the case but ours was, and there were no You Tube videos of quick and easy flooring removal with this kind of problem that I could see.
By the end of my two hour hack job I started envisioning a machine with an 18 inch wide carbide toothed drum that could be set a the depth of the flooring you wanted removed and it would just chew all of it out. It probably doesn’t exist, but it should. A quick rough estimate told me that it would take nearly eighty hours just to remove the rest of it at the rate I was going. It was time to switch to Plan B, and I will get to that in a minute.
With the carpet off, some interesting stain patterns were revealed on the pad below.
The bar was also the apparent drip zone for years of group apple and tomato canning. The amazing thing was that the carpet looked much better than everything under it. We were also very impressed with the amount of silt like dirt that was under the carpet pad. We had a great vacuum, but the nineteen years of everything it couldn’t reach was amazing and alarming.
Plan B involved filling in all of the areas where the carpet was removed with half inch thick plywood to level it off with the vinyl and underlayment that wasn’t removed. Forgot to grab a picture of my custom plywood fill job before we covered it with craft paper. I even had to fill in the spot I spent two hours removing the day before. That felt very counter productive, but we were glad to leave the demolition mode and move on to the construction phase.
We started behind the refrigerator and board by board moved out into the rest of the kitchen. Each course had its challenges with either appliances or tricky angles, but we just kept at it one board at a time.
Putting the floor down was very exciting. Mare chose the pieces and I cut and nailed. In three days we had used up all of our prepared flooring.
Quite a change from a few days ago. Once we got it under all of the appliances things went even faster and we weren’t slowing down mealtimes and clean ups anymore.
Even my test area looked better. The walnut threshold will match the walnut border out by the great room carpet and end piece in the hall.
We were so close to done. We needed about 6 more courses to finish. We have had a bit of a delay due to the planer getting repaired (glad it’s under warranty) but we are hoping to get things going again this week. We have really been enjoying what is done and can hardly get over the change it made in the kitchen. It looks like someone else’s.
January 17th, 2013 at 12:36 am
The new floor looks fantastic! You are right, it completely changes the look of the kitchen. Nice shot of the very full pantry, too, btw. When I ripped up my floor to put new tiling in about 10 years ago, I found my flooring glued to the concrete underfloor. I became intimately familiar with that chisel on a pole tool. Horrible memories.
January 18th, 2013 at 1:38 pm
Great thinking to fill in the small spaces rather than chip out the one large. BRILLIANT! The flooring is simply beautiful. Grand-dad and Dad would be so proud.
Well done, as always.
February 5th, 2013 at 11:35 pm
This is fantastic! Great work. I attacked my subfloor with hammer, chisel, and earplugs only to surrender in less than an hour with a small square liberated. I realized I would need severe anger management issues and another hundred pounds of muscle to get it done. I love the finished product. Well done.